I thought a general thread to post what board games you've been playing lately could be cool. I've never been into tracking games played or calculating five/dime lists so this isn't about the numbers. Just if you played something lately and feel like sharing with the rest of us then go for it.

Last weekend;

DOOM: The Board Game - Overlorded Level 2 for a couple friends. I got them to waste time chasing after stuff I moved with Not Quite and had a particularly nasty sequence where one of them got Sealed In a room with full health and came out a turn later with 1 health left then died shortly afterwards. Ultimately I won with six frags, but we finished the level anyways just for fun and I got a seventh frag out of it. They were pretty badass though as I let them take six cards each and choose which three to make their marine with. The game took 8 hours including a 1 hour break for dinner. With the last hour-ish being after they officially lost.

Magic: The Gathering - A friend and I did a sort of cube draft thing. This was the first time I've played since last summer. Magic is always a sit around the table relaxing on a warm evening thing to me for some reason. Anyways we did two drafts with best out of three games and played until well after midnight. I went undefeated, which is unusual for me as I normally suck at Magic.

• Use this thread for short, conversational posts and updates only, NOT in-depth reports, lengthy discussions, mini-reviews, recommendation requests etc.
• Please start new threads in the appropriate
Game Room category
for longer, more in-depth posts and discussions of specific games and related topics.

Stonecutter wrote: I have always loved Stratego. I still think it's the best of all of the classic games. Better than Risk, even.

It really is underrated in my opinion. A few years back when they reversed it where the '9' was the best unit and '1' the most common was a tragedy. I went out and found one of those wood box "classic editions" of the game with a correct number so I could have a nice proper copy of the game.

Descent 2nd Ed is so much better than 1st ed. it's a shame it has the same name. 1st edition was a grueling slog, that took hours and hours and hours. It was so bloated and loaded with stuff upon stuff. Teleport pads to go to town, making sure you had a L.O.S. to corners so shit didn't spawn. Ugh...it was a nice idea run amok.

It took us maybe and hour and a half or two hours to play the intro scenario and then both halves of one real scenario. Josh, as the Overlord, also seemed to be having fun which I don't think was really the case in 1st ed where the Overlord was a largely thankless role.

Now keep in mind, I'm no expert. I've played the intro once before and this was the first full scenario I played. Others with greater exposure may have differing thoughts but I will say that I had fun playing 2nd edition which is not something I could ever say about 1st.

We've been playing a game called CV. It is basically Yahtzee meets Funny Friends. By way of To Court the King.

It is kind of brilliant a simple and thematic. You roll icon dice. Icon dice let you buy cards. Cards give you one use buys or permanent income of dice symbols.

There are lots of little twists, but the big one is that there are 5 categories of cards. You only get the perks of the top one in each stack. This keeps the game sane, but also forces you to worry about what you are covering up---a la Innovation.

The only downside is that is has a 5-category scoring system based on cards you collected which feels a bit arbitrary and purely Euro-y, but I can't think of a better option for declaring the winner.

A good while back I picked up Doom of the Eldar and Horus Heresy (Games Workshop, although I also have the FFG HH). Hadn't gotten around to playing them though until last night when we busted out Doom of the Eldar.

It's a fun game. I'm surprised with all the Games Workshop reprints FFG has been doing that this hasn't been done in a Silverline-style format. There's really not a lot to it component-wise. The gameplay could probably handle a little updating, but it still stands up pretty well. I don't know my 40k backstory very well, but the setting is an Eldar Craftworld (read: big ship) is attacked by the Tyranid Swarm. It's almost like a Castle Panic in spaaaace where one player is the Eldar and one player is the Tyranid.

It's got 6 Phases to a turn:

Tyranid Reinforcements: Roll 2D6, and doubles could end the assault. The chance of doubles ending the assault increases as the game goes on. Then the Tyranid gets his 2D6 worth of reinforcements and rolls a D6 to place each of them in 1 of 6 deep space areas, just like Castle Panic.

Tyranid Move

Tyranid Combat

Eldar Special Action

Eldar Move

Eldar Combat

See? It's that easy.

So the Tyranid units are face-down in space as the Hive Swarm. The Tyranid player can inspect his own face-down space Tyranids. They have a singular combat value. The Eldar have some ships in space too around their Craftworld with a singular combat value. Space combat is die rolls back and forth based on stacked unit strength, on a CRT, until somebody wins or the Eldar retreat.

Once the Tyranids get to the Craftworld they are flipped face-up. There's no stacking limit in space but on the Craftworld it's 3 units per player. Units on the Craftworld have an attack and defense value, and it gets real bloody real quick. Eldar unit defenses are doubles until the Tyranids wipe them out of a Craftworld area, at which point the area loses its 2x defense fortification forever. Craftworld Combat is a single die roll by the attacker based on the attack strength to defense strength ratio, again on a CRT.

The weird thing is that the game is scored with victory points, but it works pretty well. The Eldar player only gets VP based on the length of the Tyranid Assault. Eventually the assault will end, either due to Tyranid Reinforcement doubles or a fixed point on the reinforcement track. That doesn't end the game; however, it goes until either the Craftworld has been devastated or all the Tyranids are dead. Once the assault ends though there's no further way for the Eldar player to get victory points so he really needs to defend the Craftworld. The Tyranids get VPs by devastating Craftworld areas and killing a couple Eldar special units.

The game feels like a game of its era. The game flow was a little bit clunky the first round or two, but after that we were smashing each other up and it didn't matter. The game flow gets a lot smoother as you play and figure out little ways to speed up things like placing reinforcements and such.

Session:
I was the Eldar, my wife the Tyranids. I misread a stacking limit rule and thought the stacking limit applied in space as well so I spread out my ships all over the place at the start. Her Hive Swarm mauled them, and did it with quick efficiency. I had zero ships in space by her third reinforcement phase. I could have launched a few more ships but it was a waste at that point, so the Eldar braced to defend the Craftworld. The Tyranids landed and quickly devastated a rear area, but the Eldar held off the first wave on three other fronts. That was just about the end of the good news for the Eldar though.

Consistently good reinforcement rolls kept the onslaught persistent and bloody. A couple rounds later both rear sections, both flanks, and the Craftworld's forward section were devastated. Some fancy fighting by the Eldar managed to wipe out a big chunk of the Tyranid heavy units on board the Craftworld though, which really just put them back into the reinforcement pool to come out again next turn. But then, my wife the evil Tyranid finally rolled the right doubles to end the assault. Boom. No more reinforcements for the rest of the game and most of the Tyranid heavies are back in the box. The Eldar have 5VP at this point, and so to the Tyranids for the 5 devastated Craftworld areas.

Just have to hold on. The Eldar can't gain any more VP but they can force a draw if they don't lose any more areas or one of their special units. With the Tyranid threat on board the Craftworld pushing three fronts (two flank, one rear) the Eldar repositioned their units for maximum effect. Tyranid battle in the rear section: Eldar units hold fast. Tyranids flanking the right section: Eldar annihilate the entire swarm. Tyranids pushing hard on the left flank: Bad news. I had moved some of my better units into the left flank and put one of my special "If you kill this dude you get a VP" units into the left flank because I needed the strength bonuses he gave. The odds were such that my Eldar would hold unless my evil Tyranid wife rolled a 6, which would annihilate my entire defensive force and devastate the area. That's +2 Tyranid VP for anyone counting, but the risk was necessary to hold the area. Die roll... 6. Tyranids win, and my beautiful Craftworld is full of ugly bugs. We could have played out the rest of the game to the bitter end to see what the final VP margin would have been, but we didn't because the Tyranids had won anyway.

I liked the game and my wife really liked it, which I didn't expect. Game time was about 90 minutes, but now that we know how to play I'd expect future games to be closer to the hour mark. If GW's Horus Heresy is this fun I'm going to need to track down Battle for Armageddon to complete The Trilogy.

EDIT: Crappy phone pic at about the midpoint of the game:

(Open image URL in a new window for bigger.)

EDIT again: In the pic the Tyranid assault had just stopped (doubles rolled) which is why there are no Tyranids in those labeled deeper space areas. You can also see both rear sections, both flanks, and the forward section devastated as we're in our 5VP each situation. The big triangle Avatar unit in the top-left forward section of the Craftworld was eventually the battle that won the game for the Tyranids on a combat roll of 6.

EDIT: There's a 2nd Edition CoP with mounted map on GMT P500. I don't know if it comes with the Random Event Cards. They're still available as part of
C3i magazine
but they're easy enough to print yourself.

Anybody around here have a copy of that C3i and be willing to part with those cards?

wadenels, you definitely want to track down BoA. It's the best of the three, in my opinion. I have all three and will never part with them. That time was just about the pinnacle of GW's design skillz (Warrior Knights, Fury of Dracula, etc.)

Played a game of Republic of Rome with 3 players and correct rules this time. We got hammered by Hannibal, lost in 2 hours.

Then I ran my Netrunner cube that i've been building est ages. 4 players, 4 starter sets and 4 proteus boosters i generated using some software and the 900 odd cards i have sitting around. Each player strips out the agendas for the corp and then drafts the rest and takes one of each type of ice breaker (3 cards) and 2 baselink cards then drafts the rest of the runner cards. You then slim down to a 40-60 card deck.

This worked surprisingly well. Both my decks are reasonably functional. My Corp deck is nearly as good as one of my constructed decks (that isn't saying much). I won two games lost one, but i only got 3 out of 6 games played.

We played our third session of Myth last night, finishing the first Story Quest. Overall the Act was a bit easier than the previous two, and we probably should have spawned a second lair on the large tail. Nevertheless, we dropped a bunch of crawlers (spiders) and two Scorpion Captains before proceeding to burn down the tavern where we were ambushed in the first act.

By completing the Story Quest we've now earned our first advancement, which means you can add a new special card to your deck or you can claim the title (Harbinger in this case). The Soldier claimed the title as he wanted to keep his Blue armor and the title itself also makes Minions make a Courage check before attacking you (which is kind of crazy).

I'm playing Brigand now until the 2nd wave hits, which is when I will start playing the Skald. I think we're just going to let me keep my advancements and transfer it to the Skald as we're not too picky about this sort of thing. I think I'm going to choose an Advanced Action card as opposed to the title. Still waffling though so we will see. Think the Acolyte player still needs to decide on what he will do.

After that another guy showed up and we played Rampage. This was my fourth play and I really dig it. I tend to do poorly in this game but still love it.

To close out the night we played two games of Coup. There wasn't enough lying in this particular session for my taste but still fun times.

One of the Opinionated Gamers was over from Australia for the PAX-East Event in Boston and she stopped down to meet and greet the F:AT Thursday crowd. Well some of us at least. Her handle on BGG is Melissa and she blogs using OMG Essen.

What a nice and interesting lady. Really super. She brought us Tim-Tams, a chocolate coated cookie, and Vegemite, a horrible paste like substance that you apparently spread on crackers. I brought her some Yellow Tail wine as a gift not because I know a damn thing about wine but it has a kangaroo on the bottle and you know...Australia has Kangaroos.

Anyway, we hung out for a while while she told us interesting stories of her adventure to PAX and then we played Dread Curse. I was able to pull out a victory in this by focusing more on the cards than the coins. And because I won I had a great time.

Then I lost all judgement and agreed to play a horrible game called Rococo. A game allegedly about making garments for a bunch of snooty elites going to some ball at Versailles. I say allegedly because what it really is is another dry as dust worker placement/efficiency game where you turn one resource into another and then turn that into points or money. It suffers all the pitfalls of every game of this genre not the least of which is the last few turns dragging horribly as people calculate and recalculate how to squeeze just one more point out of their possible moves.

Holy Moses, I HATE games like this. Let's put in 50 different ways to earn victory points to camouflage the fact that this is just an exercise in mental math.

Anyway, dispensing with mental exertion, I went for the "Shiny Bauble/Pretty Color" strategy. I lost. I didn't care.

Jackwraith wrote: wadenels, you definitely want to track down BoA. It's the best of the three, in my opinion. I have all three and will never part with them. That time was just about the pinnacle of GW's design skillz (Warrior Knights, Fury of Dracula, etc.)

Finally did some gaming for the first time in ages. Started out with Origin, which is a gorgeous little tactical game that I think has a lot of potential. Really beautiful game and surprisingly cheap considering how much wood is in it.

Then we played Wiraqocha, which went the way all my games of it have gone: okay, but seemingly missing something. It's on the trade pile.

While I was in a grad school, one of my grad colleagues bragged that he had never lost a game of Stratego. Like, ever. So he brought his copy down the next day and I brutally massacred him in 15 minutes over lunch. Ah, good times.